Current attempts to bring the State Social-Political Library (Gosudarstvennaia Obshchestvenno-Politicheskaia Biblioteka, GOPB) in Moscow under control of the Moscow State Social University elicited the following letter from the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam. Karin Englund, IALHI's General Secretary, wrote a note in support of it.
To the Minister of Culture of the Russian Federation,
Mikhail Efimovich Shvydkoj
Dear Mikhail Efimovich:
Please allow me to write a few words to you on the recent developments around the Gosudarstvennaia Obshchestvenno-Politicheskaia Biblioteka, which I find extremely alarming.
It seems to me I have both a right and a duty to do so. A right, since the International Institute of Social History has supported the GOPB both materially and morally from 1991 on, even before it existed under its present name. As you know, when the events of that year suddenly threw the library in a financial and administrative crisis, the IISH stepped in to provide emergency aid, which included the payment of all staff salaries for more than a year, among many other things. The reason we did this -- and this is why I consider it my duty to address you -- is simply that the GOPB was and is one of the two or three most important libraries in the field of social history anywhere in the world, on a par with the Hoover Institution in Stanford and the IISH. It is a treasure of the Russian people and a most valuable part of the world's cultural heritage. It should be defended by everybody working in its field, or, more generally, by everybody with a decent interest in modern culture.
After the efforts we made on behalf of the GOPB at the beginning of the 1990s, I was immensely relieved when it finally got the status of a federal library and was entrusted to the care of the Ministry of Culture. The Ministry has proved to be a serious and generous caretaker. Over the last decade or so, I have seen how it has done everything in its power to preserve the collection and to bring it up to modern standards. I know this has been no easy task and that temporary setbacks were unavoidable. It is only all the more remarkable that, today, the GOPB is manifestly on its way to reclaim its position among the top libraries of the world, where it rightfully belongs.
Yet apparently, in the current situation, the library risks to become, once again, a plaything of fortune as a result of attempts to make it switch, for all practical purposes, from the federal library system in which it has thrived, to a university whose reputation has yet to be established and whose future is not assured. There can be little doubt that such a move would be against the interests of both the GOPB and the federal library system. Indeed, it would be a highly peculiar move: I, for one, can think of no scholarly or administrative grounds to support it, and of so many obvious reasons to oppose it that it would even be tiresome to list them.
Frankly, I fear that the only possible cause I can see for what is going on at the moment, is the fact that the library's premises represent an attractive bit of real estate. From 1991 on, I have seen the fascination that this property exerted over a whole series of individuals and institutions. The only thing they had in common was that, whatever they pretended in public, none of them has ever been in the least interested in what the GOPB represents for culture, for science, and for Russia. I always thought, and continue to think, that they should be stopped. The GOPB belongs under the wings of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, and nowhere else.
With kind regards,
Jaap Kloosterman,
Director
[MAILTO]jkl@iisg.nl[/MAILTO]